Brown Deer — Considering all the power tools, it's relatively quiet on the sprawling Brown Deer High School shop floor. Small crews of students — mostly boys, but a few girls — are stationed around the room, measuring pieces of wood, sawing, drilling.

Teachers Craig Griffie and James Peter move from post to post offering suggestions on technique or explaining the science behind a particular process.

Griffie and Peter arrived at Brown Deer on circuitous paths. College-educated with backgrounds in construction, they were brought in last school year under the state's emergency licensing procedure designed to help districts temporarily fill a critical vacancy.

Griffie has since received an "experience-based" license for technical education teachers approved by the Legislature as part of the 2015-'17 biennial budget, and Peter is awaiting his.

The state has issued 19 such licenses to date. Now school districts are asking lawmakers to expand that alternative to cover a host of other hard-to-fill vocational education subjects, from business and marketing to agriculture, child care and culinary arts.

Critics, including the state Department of Public Instruction, the state's largest teachers union and university schools of education have raised concerns, saying the measure will lower the bar on teacher standards and create an uneven licensing system across the state.

District officials point to the critical shortage of tech and vocational education teachers, saying they need the flexibility to lure experienced professionals to the classroom or discontinue popular courses that prepare young people for work or continued training at the state's technical colleges.

"Wisconsin has a job skills gap," said Emily Koczela, finance director for the Brown Deer School District who headed a consortium of districts that helped write the budget language and companion bills now pending before the state Senate and Assembly.

"If we can't get the teachers to get students into those jobs, then we've failed them," Koczela said.

Critics acknowledge that quandary but say what's needed is a comprehensive plan to address teacher shortages and not shortcuts to licensing.

"Effective teachers need a lot more than just the skills and knowledge of a specific subject area," Betsy Kippers, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, told lawmakers at a hearing on the bill before the Assembly's Education Committee last month.

The teacher shortage, she said, "is a broad-based systemic issue and we cannot continue to use Band-Aids to fix it."

The bills would allow professionals with relevant experience — though not necessarily a college degree or the extensive methodology taught in schools of education — to qualify for a vocational education license if they meet criteria spelled out in a point system and fulfill a curriculum designed by the hiring school district. The point system weighs heavily college degrees in math, technology, science or engineering, but it would not preclude someone without a degree from obtaining a license.

Proponents say it's designed to get candidates like Peter and Griffie: smart people with the skills and an aptitude for teaching, who may not be in a position — financial or otherwise — to return to school for a technical or voc-ed license, according to Koczela.

Peter has two history degrees from Marquette University and taught at a Catholic school in Sheboygan before deciding he could earn more money rehabbing homes and managing a big box home improvement store. Griffie graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in economics and spent three years training high school volunteers to do home repairs in Appalachia.

To come in under the state's traditional tech-ed license, the two said they would have had to enroll at UW-Stout, the state's primary tech-ed program, for 60 or more credits at cost of $15,000 or more.

The state Department of Public Instruction says it already has 11 alternative paths to licensure, including at least two less costly options for Peter and Griffie.

Both men had availed themselves of the state's emergency license, but those are for a limited time, and applicants must show progress toward a traditional license during that time.

"An emergency license works for someone who is close to getting all of their requirements," Koczela said. "But sometimes, it's too much to ask."

Shortage of specialists

Districts face similar issues trying to fill other voc-ed positions, according to school officials.

Few of the state's education schools even offer majors in such voc-ed specialties as agriculture, business and marketing, or family and consumer sciences, and those that do have seen enrollments decline.

Over the last three years, there were two to four times as many vacancies in voc-ed specialties as graduates available to fill them, according to data compiled for the consortium by Judy Mueller, human resources director for the Franklin School District.

At the same time, districts lose experienced vocational education teachers to the technical colleges and private sector, said Lisa Olson, superintendent of Hartford Union School District, about 35 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

"Two years ago, we had a business marketing instructor go to Kohl's Corp. And the same year a business and computer instructor left to go to Moraine Park Technical College," Olson said.

This year it lost two more teachers — one in agriculture and the other in family and consumer sciences — in August.

"We were luckily able to steal an ag teacher from a small rural district. They still haven't filled that vacancy. And I feel really bad about that," she said.

West Allis-West Milwaukee schools lost both its business and family and consumer sciences teachers this fall. It covered the consumer sciences class with substitutes, and just hired a new business teacher this month.

"For high school positions, we usually get 60 to 100 applicants in any subject area," said Kristen Gurtner, the district's director of human resources. "For business, we had three applicants, and only one was certified."

Proponents of the bill say midcareer professionals with current industry experience have as much or more to offer students than traditional teachers with no or outdated industry experience. And they say the vocational courses provide students important exposure to career options at a time when many students are graduating from traditional four-year colleges with limited job options and no discernible career path.

"I have a doctorate. I love education and learning," Hartford Union's Olson said. "But I'm also realistic. We all have different strengths ... and we want people to contribute to the economy any way they can."

Critics argue such programs duplicate what's already offered in technical colleges and may pigeonhole students too early, before they can be exposed to other career paths. And they say skill-based licensing ignores the importance of pedagogy — the method and practices of teaching — that is emphasized in traditional schools of education.

"A teacher should be well-rounded, someone who is there for the purpose of educating the whole child. And that means understanding how your curriculum fits into the curriculum of the school. And how that intersects with how you become a good citizen," said Brian McAlister, an associate dean who heads the technology education program at UW-Stout.

"These are children and some people are treating them like the are human capital that needs to be molded into something that industry needs. And I have a problem with that," he said. "We should be educating kids and not training them to fit into someone's economic model."

TEACHER

LICENSING

The Legislature approved experience-based licenses as part of the 2015-'17 budget. The state has issued 19 such licenses to date.

Now, school districts are asking lawmakers to expand that to cover other hard-to-fill vocational education subjects, from business and marketing to agriculture, child care and culinary arts.